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3232Howards End on TV: life would be worse for a modern-day Leonard Basthttp://forster-afar.com/howards-end-tv-life-worse-modern-day-leonard-bast
http://forster-afar.com/howards-end-tv-life-worse-modern-day-leonard-bast#respondThu, 16 Nov 2017 14:10:34 +0000http://forster-afar.com/?p=138From the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/11/howards-end-em-forster-television?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks In 1909, EM Forster published a short story set in the future called “The Machine Stops”. It was, he said later, a reaction to the utopias of HG Wells. In Forster’s vision, people in the future live

From the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/11/howards-end-em-forster-television?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks

In 1909, EM Forster published a short story set in the future called “The Machine Stops”. It was, he said later, a reaction to the utopias of HG Wells. In Forster’s vision, people in the future live in enclosed underground rooms, communicating only through video conferencing and messaging, engaging with people only through what is, fairly exactly, depicted as the internet to come. When the Machine breaks down, most people die immediately from the shock. Does Forster still speak to us? You bet he does.

An exact technological prediction is remarkable by itself. Forster goes on telling us about our lives because of where that prediction sprang from. He saw, above all, both that people need to be with each other, and that they will constantly put up barriers to prevent these connections. Laws against sexual connection and artificial conventions against associations across race or social levels are Forster’s subject. As a novelist he loves the rules that mean that Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson should not marry; that Maurice and Alec have to disappear from society; that Aziz and Fielding cannot be friends. He is in the not unusual position for a novelist of hoping that changes in society will make his novel unnecessary.

In this, Forster failed, and so his books remain necessary. Probably his most important novel is Howards End, but its meaning has rather shifted over the years. For most readers, the novel now matters most when it turns to Leonard Bast: hungry for culture and learning, intelligent but disadvantaged and at the mercy of the whims of the rich. In my view, Forster underestimates what a Leonard Bast could have done to save himself in 1910. There were dozens of literary and popular journals at the time that would have happily published a short story or a piece of reportage from a literate, intelligent, working-class writer, and paid a very useful £20 for it. By contrast, in 2017, a Leonard Bast would be unlikely to meet a Helen Schlegel at a concert in London. He wouldn’t be able to afford to live in London; his education wouldn’t have introduced him to that sort of high culture; there are no libraries with the resources to let him pursue his curiosity. If he lost his job, as Bast does, there would, in effect, be no means of supporting himself through literary expression. That has passed into the hands of the children of the rich. A modern-day Bast would not starve, but he would be seriously deprived, and he would have been kept from the literature that could have saved Forster’s character. Things for him have got worse.

Bast is an intensely controversial figure, still, and one of the marks of Forster’s vivid energy is how much acrimonious debate is raised by his novels. When Maurice was published after Forster’s death, critics queued up to explain that it was, of course, far weaker than his other novels because of its subject of homosexual identity. Actually, it was written between Howards End and A Passage to India, and (for some of us, at least) it ranks with his very best work. Its subject, of how a minority can live in a society that proscribes it, continues to be of general interest: the specific case, neatly demonstrated by the novel’s eventual reception, of how homosexual voices are denigrated and ignored, has become still more marked. It is hard to imagine a 21st-century homosexual novelist being permitted to have the cultural centrality of a Forster, a Proust, a Thomas Mann, a Gide.

Perhaps still more acrimonious is the debate over A Passage to India, and in particular what Indian readers regard as its unwitting Orientalism. The large question here is perhaps a self-important one: will Indians and Englishmen ever be able to be friends? Personally, as someone who is married to a Bengali, I rather hope we’ve reached that point, but there is no doubt that the question, viewed from the other side, has for once become rather irrelevant. For Indians, not very much rests on it any more. And yet the larger question – are we going to retreat into our cells, our nationhood, the social status that has been awarded us? – is more important than ever. All Forster’s novels are crowded with characters, making connections or resisting connection; they were written, it seems to me, by a shy person who saw the importance of not retreating, but reaching out.

Most intelligent people come to the view that life is a long and painful journey towards this general statement: “Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.” Forster always understood that. He said he gave two cheers for democracy, and was rather reviled for it, but after Trump and Brexit, we concede his point. Humanity is fundamentally decent; and it is hard to look at the suffering humanity causes. The steadily increasing aptness of Forster to the way we live is, in some ways, a matter we might choose to regret.

]]>http://forster-afar.com/julian-barnes-i-wrong-em-forster/feed0Simon During : Against Democracy Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipationshttp://forster-afar.com/simon-democracy-literary-experience-era-emancipations
http://forster-afar.com/simon-democracy-literary-experience-era-emancipations#respondSun, 22 May 2016 17:25:45 +0000http://forster-afar.com/?p=121This book argues that we can no longer envision a political system that might practically displace democracy or, more accurately, global democratic state capitalism. Democracy has become fundamental: It extends deeper and deeper into everyday life; it grounds and limits

]]>This book argues that we can no longer envision a political system that might practically displace democracy or, more accurately, global democratic state capitalism. Democracy has become fundamental: It extends deeper and deeper into everyday life; it grounds and limits our political thought and values. That is the sense in which we do indeed live at history’s end. But this end is not a happy one, because the system that we now have does not satisfy tests that we can legitimately put to it.

In this situation, it is important to come to new terms with the fact that literature, at least until about 1945, was predominantly hostile to political democracy. Literature’s deep-seated conservative, counterdemocratic tendencies, along with its capacity to make important distinctions among political, cultural, and experiential democracies and its capacity to uncover hidden, nonpolitical democracies in everyday life, is now a resource not just for cultural conservatives but for all those who take a critical attitude toward the current political, cultural, and economic structures. Literature, and certain novelists in particular, helps us not so much to imagine social possibilities beyond democracy as to understand how life might be lived both in and outside democratic state capitalism.

Drawing on political theory, intellectual history, and the techniques of close reading, Against Democracy offers new accounts of the ethos of refusing democracy, of literary criticism’s contribution to that ethos, and of the history of conservatism, as well as innovative interpretations of a range of writers, including Tocqueville, Disraeli, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Saul Bellow.

]]>http://forster-afar.com/simon-democracy-literary-experience-era-emancipations/feed0Figures of Catastrophe: The Condition of Culture Novel (Contains a chapter on Howards End)http://forster-afar.com/figures-of-catastrophe-the-condition-of-culture-novel-contains-a-chapter-on-howards-end
http://forster-afar.com/figures-of-catastrophe-the-condition-of-culture-novel-contains-a-chapter-on-howards-end#respondSun, 22 May 2016 17:22:39 +0000http://forster-afar.com/?p=116Figures of Catastrophe: The Condition of Culture Novel by Francis Mulhern A bold new vision of the modern English novel The leading critic Francis Mulhern uncovers a hidden history in the fiction of the past century, identifying a central new genre:

The leading critic Francis Mulhern uncovers a hidden history in the fiction of the past century, identifying a central new genre: the condition of culture novel. Reading across and against the grain of received patterns of literary association, tracing a line from Hardy and Forster, through Woolf, Waugh and Bowen, to Barstow, Fowles, Rendell, Naipaul, Amis, Kureishi and Smith, he elucidates the recurring topics and narrative logics of the genre, showing how culture emerges as a special ground of social conflict, above all between classes. The narrative evaluations of culture’s ends—the aspirations and the destinies of those whose lives are the subject of these novels—grow steadily darker over time, and the writing itself grows more introverted.

A concluding discussion elicits the characteristics of the English condition of culture novel, in an international setting, and closes in, finally, on the central conundrum of the genre: its uncanny reprise, in its own plane, of the historical arc of the modern labour movement in Britain, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century through its post-war heyday to the seemingly inexorable decline of recent decades.

]]>http://forster-afar.com/figures-of-catastrophe-the-condition-of-culture-novel-contains-a-chapter-on-howards-end/feed0Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home by Susan Hillhttp://forster-afar.com/howards-end-landing-year-reading-home-susan-hill
http://forster-afar.com/howards-end-landing-year-reading-home-susan-hill#respondSun, 22 May 2016 10:15:31 +0000http://forster-afar.com/?p=109http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/31/howards-landing-susan-hill-review Ian Pindar Saturday 31 October 2009 00.15 GMT Searching for Howards End one day in her seemingly infinite Gloucestershire farmhouse, the novelist Susan Hill encounters a mountain of unread Booker prize winners and Richard and Judy recommendations. She resolves thenceforth to stop buying books for

Searching for Howards End one day in her seemingly infinite Gloucestershire farmhouse, the novelist Susan Hill encounters a mountain of unread Booker prize winners and Richard and Judy recommendations. She resolves thenceforth to stop buying books for a year and to explore her own voluminous bookshelves instead.

It’s a purely personal exercise. After a year, Hill has drawn up a list of 40 titles that “I think I could manage with alone, for the rest of my life”. This is not a list of the 40 best books ever written. It has essentially the same quality as an inventory of favourite puddings, and is similarly comforting. Trollope and Wodehouse have two titles each on the list, which tells us something about Hill’s tastes, as does the absence of any European authors. What we are left with is a mind-map of a novelist in her late 60s who has spent her life reading and writing books.

That this is not a list of the best new writing is apparent from her conservative poetry choices: late TS Eliot, WH Auden (whom she studied at A-level) and the Heaney-Hughes anthology The Rattle Bag. “I do not read much poetry now, and rarely anything new,” she admits. “I know I should. Should. Ought. But I don’t and that’s that. Perhaps I don’t need to. I can recite the whole of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, after all.” Eliot and Virginia Woolf are, in fact, subversive Modernists who have somehow made it under the radar of Hill’s traditional tastes. She doesn’t like it when “linguistic or stylistic obscurity is a hindrance to understanding”. She opts for To the Lighthouse rather than The Waves, because the latter “always reminds me of the sort of highbrow radio play they used to broadcast on Radio 3”.

Hill’s old farmhouse is a major character in the book, with its aged wood beams and elm-wood stairs, “the Aga in the kitchen, the wood burner in the sitting room”. It’s a snug, warm, relaxing place where one might open a random volume and find a Christmas card from Penelope Fitzgerald. She excels at creating an autumnal, “throw another log on the fire” atmosphere; a cosy world of “doing crosswords and answering quizzes at Christmas”. Meanwhile, lurking about the house is the shadowy presence of the “Shakespeare Professor”, her husband Stanley Wells, whose bookshelves include long-forgotten Elizabethan plays with intriguing titles such as an Interlude called Lusty Juventus. Hill gives these a wide berth.

The autobiographical elements in the book are often delightful — Hill devoured detective stories as light relief from Beowulf while reading English at King’s College London — and it is hard not to agree with her when she waxes lyrical about the Oxford World’s Classics series (“printed on fine paper and published in demy octavo”) or the Observer books of Moths, Birds’ Eggs, Churches; or the beauty of some typefaces (Hill is a publisher too, and appreciates such things). There are also touching reminiscences of Charles Causley, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and the dying Bruce Chatwin. Hill’s novelist’s eye perfectly captures EM Forster in the London Library (“He seemed slightly stooping and wholly unmemorable”).

This might have been a smug and indulgent book, but Hill manages to keep it charming, aided by the quality of her writing. Her legion of fans will love it; the rest of us might also enjoy its gently whimsical, self-effacing tone, even if, lurking beneath, are the steely prejudices of Middle England.

]]>http://forster-afar.com/howards-end-landing-year-reading-home-susan-hill/feed0Vanessa Redgrave: ‘I’m stunned anyone ever said a word against Howards End’http://forster-afar.com/104-2
http://forster-afar.com/104-2#respondSun, 22 May 2016 10:09:57 +0000http://forster-afar.com/?p=104http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/may/13/vanessa-redgrave-im-stunned-anyone-ever-said-a-word-against-howards-end Catherine Shoard As the acclaimed Merchant Ivory film is screened in Cannes, Redgrave and director James Ivory discuss cinema’s backlash against costume drama, and why EM Forster would have approved of social media ‘ It’s superb film-making. Some people

As the acclaimed Merchant Ivory film is screened in Cannes, Redgrave and director James Ivory discuss cinema’s backlash against costume drama, and why EM Forster would have approved of social media

‘ It’s superb film-making. Some people won’t go along with that. But who cares about those people?’ … James Ivory and Vanessa Redgrave hit the red carpet. Photograph: David Fisher/REX/Shutterstock

Twenty-four years ago, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter strode up the red carpet in Cannes to present Howards End, the latest EM Forster adaptation by director/producer powerhouse James Ivory and Ismail Merchant. The film was ecstatically received and, despite losing out on the Palme d’Or to The Best Intentions, the Bille August drama about Bergman’s parents, it did go on to impress at the box office and win countless awards, including three Oscars.

On Friday, Redgrave and Ivory were back on the Croisette (Merchant died in 2005) to present a restored print, reflect on how the film’s message – about the necessity of bridging the English class divide – is less fashionable today and consider why the film’s fortunes fell in favour of a millennial itch for grit.

The success of Merchant Ivory’s catalogue in the 1990s presaged a glut of upscale costume dramas, meaning the company name became a barbed byword for a particular type of prestige British film-making. “It was a political attitude that rose up against anything to do with old England,” said Ivory. “Such political things lose their strength after a while and fall away and what you made doesn’t lose its strength, hopefully.”

“It was a new kind of snobbery. We were showing examples of snobbery but their attitude was very snobbish.”

Such opinions, said Redgrave, were often the result “of people who just like hearing the sound of their own voice and have usually not seen the film. Howards End is really, really deep.”

“I’ve found throughout my life that people jump to assumptions without having any knowledge, really. But they like to make an opinion and if it’s flashy or well-chosen or whatever then it becomes a catchphrase and becomes passed around. It’s like catching a cold, it seems to me. I’m stunned that anybody ever should have said a word [against it]. It’s superb film-making. Some people won’t go along with that. But who cares about those people?”

In the film, Redgrave plays Mrs Wilcox, the first wife of Hopkins’ banker. She is highly-attached to their country home, Howards End, and leaves it in her will to her friend Margaret Schlegel (Thompson), who, with her siblings, is being evicted from their flat by developers.

Wilcox and his children burn the will, but Margaret and her family end up inheriting the property anyway after she and Wilcox marry; the fates of the two families become further entwined when Margaret and sister Helen (Bonham Carter) try to improve the lot of a sensitive bank clerk, Leonard Bast (Samuel West).

Redgrave rejects any suggestion the narrative reinforces predestination – “I don’t believe in fate for a second. Why should I?” – but says that since the film was shot she has come increasingly to “share James’s belief in humans and in extraordinary processes of nature. Even when the odds seem entirely against something good happening it happens. That’s without a doubt. Sometimes one can get impatient with superficial reactions of media or a person or whatever. I sometimes get maddened by the Guardian but nevertheless. As the film shows, I think perfectly, there’s more to life and human beings than the human beings themselves know.”

Forster’s dream that the classes would manage to connect had been realised through social media, says Ivory. “I think he would have liked anything which brought people together, where they would open their hearts and minds to each other. Social media does do that; in a very superficial way sometimes, but it has brought us closer.”

Although Ivory said that rewatching the film had alerted him to one shot he would now shoot differently, Redgrave said there was nothing about her performance she would alter with hindsight.

“I have done work in films [where] I’ve deeply regretted some of the choices that were made which I had to adapt to and which I made which were clearly not right. You see those moments in your work overall but not in this film.”

The critical and commercial success of Howards End should, said Redgrave, stand as an example to financiers wary of backing apparently non-commercial projects. Producers today, she said are forced “to think what the financiers and distributors are wanting, not what ordinary people are wanting. Because the two have got nothing to do with each other.”

]]>http://forster-afar.com/104-2/feed0Forsterian Prescience: I say this because I am JNU or HCUhttp://forster-afar.com/forsterian-prescience-i-say-i-jnu-hcu
http://forster-afar.com/forsterian-prescience-i-say-i-jnu-hcu#respondWed, 11 May 2016 12:21:02 +0000http://forster-afar.com/?p=94http://www.catchnews.com/politics-news/forsterian-prescience-i-say-this-because-i-am-jnu-or-hcu-1459860489.html By Dr Maaz Bin Bilal The ever-ironic liberal writer Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), famous for A Passage to India (1924) and other novels, wrote a prescient dialogue in his lesser-read-and-liked The Longest Journey (1908) that is apropos to the liberal crisis in contemporary India.

The ever-ironic liberal writer Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), famous for A Passage to India (1924) and other novels, wrote a prescient dialogue in his lesser-read-and-liked The Longest Journey (1908) that is apropos to the liberal crisis in contemporary India.

It reflects most lucidly on the abstract behemoth of the nation that is being stuffed down people’s throats to shut them up, and the very different and opposing strategies that “the great world” and the institutions of knowledge opposing it adopt.

FORSTER’S CHARACTER

Rickie and Ansell are studying at Cambridge as they discuss what the “great world” thinks of the university. Rickie, speaking in “journalese”, according to Ansell, accuses Cambridge to be out of touch with the times, to satisfy not “the professions, the public schools, nor the great mass of men and women,” and claims “that her day is over.”

This must sound similar to Arnab and converts where “the nation” wants to know only selective things, condemns what it feels like, and demands the subsidised university to follow its diktat. The “journalese” of mass media shapes popular opinion in India in an unprecedented manner.

“The great mass of men and women” whoever they are seem not just dissatisfied but angry on TV, and demand blood from the vulnerable. Whom do these people really represent?

DECONSTRUCTING PROPAGANDA

Through Ansell, Forster deconstructs some of these modern myths created by the propaganda of “the great world,” which in more explicit terms one needs to pinpoint today as the great nation being thrown in our faces: “Where is it? How do you set about finding it? How long does it take to get there? What does it think? What does it do? What does it want?”

As Nivedita Menon in her teach-in lecture at JNU on nationalism emphasised using Ernest Renan, the nation is in fact a daily plebiscite, a constantly changing formation of opinion.

Does it ever think one thought? Does it ever seek to know one thing? Especially, a country like India -which speaks in multiple languages, produces art in multiple traditions, and where large populations struggle for survival on a daily basis?

Does “it”, whatever that entity may entail, want to persecute in its name the top universities and their students who are asserting their right to think and question? Or do the impoverished bare lives of this country, which should ethically and constitutionally be a part of “the nation” not care in the least about what the failing state thinks of Pakistan, or China, or “anti-nationals”?

Does it not demand for food, and, yes, infrastructural “development,” and a better quality of life?

GREAT WORLD, LITTLE EARTH

Forster’s Ansell goes on to assert: “There is no great world at all, only a little earth, for ever isolated from the rest of the little solar system.”

What does a village in Vidarbha know of the celestials of Delhi’s power circles? Ansell’s continuing monologue needs to be quoted at length for the close insight it carries: “The earth is full of tiny societies, and Cambridge is one of them.

All the societies are narrow, but some are good and some are bad. . . The good societies say, ‘I tell you to do this because I am Cambridge.’ The bad ones say, ‘I tell you to do that because I am the great world, not because I am ‘Peckham,’ or ‘Billingsgate,’ or ‘Park Lane,’ but ‘because I am the great world.’

They lie. And fools like you listen to them, and believe that they are a thing which does not exist and never has existed, and confuse ‘great,’ which has no meaning whatever, with ‘good,’ which means salvation.”

THE ‘NATION’, THE REFUGE

Forster’s Ansell, although an atheist like the writer, adopts a theological vocabulary to emphasise the distinction between the great and the good.

Gandhi’s and Tagore’s moral visions for the country were emancipatory, they were good. On the other hand, so-called greatness, such as is now being claimed largely by various right-wing outfits who clamour for “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, is never urged in their own names, and only aspires for greatness for its own sake.

The Sangh does not even say that saying ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ is compulsory because the Sangh wants it. They attribute that demand to ‘the Nation’.

A JNU [Jawaharlal Nehru University] or an HCU [Hyderabad Central University], if they protest for freedom of speech, for social and juridical justice for the deceased, Afzal Guru or Rohith Vemula, they do so as students of their universities, as citizens of the country who abide by the country’s law, and question its shortcomings legally from ethical vantage points of human rights.

They do not pose as what they are not, nor do they claim to represent the world, or the nation. They value human life and sing for it, not for an abstract idea that kills for itself.

DOS AND DON’TS

It is not good enough to claim, as Makarand Paranjpe did in his lecture at JNU, that we must follow the middle path towards knowledge and understanding (even if he said it with far more jargon).

One must practise it by focused listening, as was allowed to him at JNU, although not practiced by him when he went astray from his prescribed method to launch into ad hominem attacks.

Nor was this listening allowed by those in power to those who were arrested and kept in jail for days, nor to him who committed suicide, and now not to those whose food, power, water, and internet supplies were disrupted.

RESISTANCE TO INTELLECTUALS

Lastly, ever-alert to both sides of the coin, and a brilliant listener, Forster makes his Rickie retort validly to Ansell on the university’s exclusions: “‘I never shall come indoors again,’ said Rickie. . . ‘It’s well enough for those who’ll get a Fellowship, but in a few weeks I shall go down. In a few years it’ll be as if I’ve never been up. It matters very much to me what the world is like.'”

There is an insecurity, a resistance that intellectual breeds in others, and there needs to be more engagement with what are otherwise called the world, the nation, or Forster’s “masses of men and women.”

There is the fear of intellectual snobbery that is evident in the earlier speech of Ansell too when he compares Cambridge to the lesser public schools of England. The intellectuals who raise slogans for freedoms must also try to be evermore inclusive.

MAKE MORE JNUS

The argument in India too then should not be that the so-called “we” should contain what the students of the heavily subsidised JNU think or do. Instead, there needs to be a call for more and more institutions of learning that are heavily subsidised, that produce quality scholarship and continue to question inequality in their own names, in the name of the constitution, and of human rights with the goal to improve upon the state and make it more inclusive and a better democracy.

]]>http://forster-afar.com/forsterian-prescience-i-say-i-jnu-hcu/feed0Pilot Theatre & York Theatre Royal to Premiere THE MACHINE STOPS AT THE POINT in Junehttp://forster-afar.com/pilot-theatre-york-theatre-royal-premiere-machine-stops-point-june
http://forster-afar.com/pilot-theatre-york-theatre-royal-premiere-machine-stops-point-june#respondWed, 11 May 2016 12:18:41 +0000http://forster-afar.com/?p=91http://www.broadwayworld.com/uk-regional/article/Pilot-Theatre-York-Theatre-Royal-to-Premiere-THE-MACHINE-STOPS-AT-THE-POINT-in-June-20160510# Pilot Theatre and York Theatre Royal present the world premiere of E.M. Forster’s iconic short story The Machine Stops at The Point on Thursday 9th June. In a dystopian world where humans have retreated far underground, Kuno alone questions

Pilot Theatre and York Theatre Royal present the world premiere of E.M. Forster’s iconic short story The Machine Stops at The Point on Thursday 9th June.

In a dystopian world where humans have retreated far underground, Kuno alone questions their now total dependency on technology to live and communicate with each other, but in his struggle to break out can he reach the Earth’s surface before the Machine stops?

Adapted for the stage by celebrated playwright Neil Duffield, and with a brand new soundtrack composed by electronic music pioneer John Foxx, The Machine Stops is a thrilling exploration into man and the machine. Entirely relevant to today, this stage adaptation of E.M. Forster’s classic story is exquisite, shocking and original. Don’t miss the exclusive opportunity to see it first, when it debuts on The Point’s stage this June.

Suitable for all, tickets are £14 with £12 concessions. To book your spot to this not-to-be-missed premiere visit www.thepointeastleigh.co.uk or phone the Box Office on 023 8065 2333.